In the field of communication networks/services, management platforms are provided which include a plurality of components such as Operations Support Systems (OSS) organized on hierarchical architectures, sometimes based on agents.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,243,396 discloses, for example, a communication network management system or platform. having a multi-layer hierarchical architecture of interconnected management authorities controlling telecommunication network resources. Each authority has a number of agents responsible for the execution of processes, which may be intelligent or simply reactive agents.
In the known architecture, the reactive agents are located within a platform part of the authority and the intelligent agents are located within a controlling part of the authority. The intelligent and reactive agents are grouped into functional components to provide FCAPS (Fault, Configuration, Accounting, Performance, Security) functionalities to the platform.
WO 01/02973 teaches use a platform comprising a centralised process coordinator for coordination of distributed agents, typically realized with a workflow engine running workflow descriptions (similar to flowcharts) which comprise delegation of jobs to components (the agents), collection of responses from agents, and so on.
Applicant believes that the above architectures do not ensure that agents execute jobs delegated by the workflow engine.
In fact, IT resources available to agents, like computing power, are limited and it is not granted that IT resources are enough to match business goals or workload requested to the platform.
In other words, IT resources available to agents can prevent reaching predetermined business goals which require tasks, as for example the delivery of a service to a customer, being performed by the agents.
For example, a task can be the completion of a determined process in an average time shorter than a predefined time duration, or the completion of a determined number of processes within a fixed deadline.
Huge workload on an agent may prevent the agent from completing the task in a predefined average time or within the fixed deadline therefore causing the business goal not to be reached.
Another problem in agent-based architecture using a centralised process coordinator, as disclosed in WO 01/02973, is that the coordinator itself becomes a bottleneck in operation of the platform, and the more process logic is externalized from the agents adding workflows into the coordinator to improve flexibility, the slower the coordinator becomes. That can worsen the ability of the architecture to cope with business performance goals, like processes with deadlines for their execution.                In the field of IT resource management US patent application no. 2003/0167270 discloses a resource management system in a distributed environment comprised of hosts instantiating copies of a scalable application. The resource management system generates signals to start up, shutdown or move selected copies of a scalable application across the hosts, based on information on application copies and host performance.        
This kind of solution is not well suited for a platform comprising a distributed agent architecture coordinated by a or process coordinator or workflow engine for at least the following reasons:                in case that all agents are already executing some tasks there can be no free agents for a new execution of an urgent task or application;        each time a new workflow (i.e. a new functionality) is defined, in order to meet business goals (e.g. deadlines on business processes), the known system needs to measure parameters on the applications and build a new model to tune the behaviour of all the agents;        the known resource management system works only for the applications or functionalities that can be instantiated into multiple copies.        